EZGUI and portable apps !

EZGUI (combined with the PowerBasic compiler) has one nice advantage for software developers and that is the ability to create applications which are truly portable.

What is a portable app ?

A portable app is one which can be installed on any media (Flash Drive, SD card, etc.) and then run on any PC without the need for installing anything on the PC itself. The application must not require any components be installed to the system folders, be registered with the operating system or require a system runtime which may not be already installed on the end users PC (ie. dot.net runtimes) and requires a large download to be installed if not present.

One advantage of PowerBasic is that you don’t have to register anything with the operating system for your apps to run.

Now combine this with EZGUI which uses the standard DLL format for its library and you have a development system that does not require any special installation for your apps. You can simply copy and run or something better !

There appears to be market for apps which can be considered Portable ?

EZGUI’s design makes it an excellent tool for building unique Portable apps. Not only does EZGUI come in DLL format (so it is truly portable), but there are some other aspects of EZGUI which makes it well suited to building portable apps.

(1) Extremely small footprint !

The entire runtime comes in at about 1 meg in size (main runtime is only 700 KB) so it is tiny for the feature set it supports.

(2) Shared runtime !

Because the EZGUI runtime is shareable (meaning you can write multiple EXE’s which all share the same runtime) you can build complex suites of apps which can all be installed on one small external media (ie. SD card) and only need one copy of the runtime for all the apps (put all in the same folder).

EZGUI apps (the EXE’s) are tiny in comparison to their standalone counerparts (if you wrote an app as one EXE only and no runtime), so they take up little room.

(3) Windows versions not critical !

Because of EZGUI’s unique design it can handle multiple versions of Windows with little problem. You can easily write apps which run on Windows XP, Vista, 7 and Windows 8 without the need to worry about installing any special runtimes for a specific version of Windows or whether it has a special runtime installed on the end users PC (like some have with dot.net runtimes).

This makes EZGUI apps even more portable. Imagine advertising your apps as truly portable and able to run on Windows XP to Windows 8 !

Now consider what this means. End users could install your apps on tiny external media (how about 1 gig or less jump drives or SD cards). The media is inexpensive (you could even use a 256 meg jump drive) and very portable. Because EZGUI apps are so small in size and require minimal resources, they should load fast and run fast too !

Developers who write apps using dot.net based languages can’t do, so easily, what you can do with EZGUI.

Imagine your end users being able to install the app on a 256 meg jump drive (so cheap they can buy dozens) and then running the app from almost any Windows PC (Windows RT not included) !

Businesses with love this feature. Just plug it in any PC and run !

So if you want to create real portable applications, take a closer look at EZGUI (and PowerBasic).

For more info about EZGUI:  http://cwsof.com

For more info about PowerBasic:  http://powerbasic.com